VALPARAISO – No, Tubby Smith says, he hasn’t sat down his High Point Panthers and shown them the tape of the 1998 NCAA Tournament final.

“I haven’t watched that tape in years,” the 67-year-old basketball coach says on a recent snowy afternoon after a pregame shootaround at Homer Drew Court.

Nor has Smith, who coached Kentucky past Utah on that glittering Monday night 20 years ago in San Antonio, attempted to inspire his Big South players by showing off his championship bling.

“I’ve never had it on,” he says several hours before securing career victory No. 601, a 55-53 nail-biter over Valparaiso. “I don’t even know where it is. It’s probably boxed up somewhere. My wife may have hocked it already.”

Here, the self-effacing Smith gives another of his throaty laughs. Getting fired from two of his past three jobs – Minnesota and Memphis with a stop at Texas Tech in between – will either make a man bitter or fearless.

For Smith, who had three years and $10 million left on his Memphis deal, the latter path was the only option.

That’s part of the reason he finds himself back at his alma mater, in the same sleepy furniture town in North Carolina where met his wife Donna when she was a freshman from Richmond and he was a hotshot senior from southern Maryland.

That was back in the early ‘70s, a lifetime ago, a few years after a freshly hired Maryland coach named Lefty Driesell made it clear that Smith, a Terrapins signee, might be better off playing at a smaller school.

“He didn’t have to say it out loud,” Smith says. “I took the hint. That was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

He soon began a coaching trek that started out at the high school level and also has included stops at Tulsa and Georgia. Flash isn’t part of his repertoire, but he still finds himself part of a recent trend of championship-winning coaches returning to the sideline in their Social Security years.

Jim Calhoun, 76, is starting up a new program at Division III St. Joseph in West Hartford. Football coaches Mack Brown, back at North Carolina at age 67, and 65-year-old Les Miles at Kansas are the others.

Former Kentucky coach Tubby Smith, now at High Point University, runs practice along with son G.G. Smith (right)(Photo: Mike Berardino)

“We can sell Tubby a whole lot,” Panthers associate head coach G.G. Smith says of his father. “That’s what we’ve been doing. He’s been a big plus, having a national championship coach at High Point.”

The big news on this morning is the retirement of another well-traveled championship coach, Urban Meyer at Ohio State. That has the elder Smith, whose Panthers will play in Columbus on Dec. 29, counting his blessings and sharing some of his longevity secrets in a high-stress profession.

“My dad told me a long time ago, ‘It’s a game. You’re making a good living doing what you love doing and don’t you ever think that it’s work,’ “ Smith says. “My dad raised 17 kids. He taught me the value of hard work and compartmentalizing.”

He smiles.

“Dealing with stress?” he says. “Stress is how are you going to feed your family? How are you going to keep a roof over their head? How are you going to pay the bills? That’s stress. If you’re coaching basketball, it’s a game, man. I always looked at it that way.”

Another knowing smile.

“And it’s probably not acceptable in some circles because they don’t think you give it all you have,” he says. They think, ‘Why are you not going berserk?’ “

Kentucky, where the criticism turned ugly once things went south, was one of those places. Things should be different at High Point, where he doesn’t use his trademark stomp very often anymore.

“I stomped the other day,” he says. “I hurt my foot. I’m too old for that.”

Smith briefly pondered taking it to the house after getting axed two years into his latest rebuilding project, but then he warmed to the next challenge of helping his old school, a place where he and Donna had already been among the most generous donors.

G.G. Smith, who resigned after five disappointing seasons as coach at Loyola Maryland, called it “the perfect storm” for his father to return to High Point and for them to be working together again for the first time since the Kentucky days.

When school president Nido Qubein called, Tubby Smith found himself energized once more. The Panthers, a preseason pick to finish seventh in the 11-team Big South, had already announced plans to name the court after the Smith family at a new $120 million arena set to open with the 2020-21 season.

Why not coach the team that opens that arena as well?

“I think it could be in the same realm of a Davidson,” Smith says. “It’s a similar-type school.”

He also sees parallels to Tulsa, another small private school that somehow became a cradle of coaches, starting with Nolan Richardson and continuing through J.D. Barnett, Bill Self, Steve Robinson and, of course, Smith.

“We had big dreams,” he says. “We’ve done it before at this level. See what I mean? So, we know what it takes to do that and we can use that as a framework.”

CLOSE

Former Kentucky coach Tubby Smith, now at his alma mater of High Point (N.C.) University, is still going at age 67
Mike Berardino, IndyStar

He needs more players, especially after losing 16-point scorer Andre Fox to South Alabama as a transfer, but Smith already has his undersized group playing stout defense. It helped them beat South Dakota in Bimini and collect road wins at East Carolina and Valparaiso, where the Crusaders shot just 33 percent from the field.

“We knew it was going to be a grind-out game,” Valparaiso coach Matt Lottich said. “They play what I would call kind an old-school type of basketball. Most people are going to pace and space. They don’t do that. They grind the clock and make you work defensively and they make it hard to score.”

In other words, the Panthers have already taken on Smith’s blue-collar personality.

There was no fist pumping or outward celebration for Smith, not even after a prayer banked in with 0.5 seconds left in a tie game. Part of that is the decades of highs and lows in his rearview mirror.

Another reason is the perspective that comes with the sort of loss Smith experienced in mid-November. Karim Sameh Azab, a 6-foot-10 forward whom Smith recruited to Memphis, died at age 22 after a brief bout with leukemia.

“We were playing in the AAC Tournament,” Smith says softly, “and he had a lump under his arm pit.”

Eight months later, Azab was done.

That made Smith think back to Marvin Stone, one of his former Kentucky players who died of a heart attack while playing in Saudi Arabia, and John Stewart, the talented 7-footer from Lawrence North who had signed with Kentucky but suffered a heart attack while playing in a Class 4A regional game in March 1999.

Smith was in New Orleans, getting ready to coach the reigning NCAA champions in a first-round game against New Mexico State. A Lexington reporter called with the stunning news as Smith was boarding the team bus.